This comes in direct contradiction to statements by Full-Blooded Italians director–James Comey…wait…that doesn’t sound like an Italian last name…oh…sorry…wrong “FBI”. Federal Bureau of Investigations Director, James Comey, has made claims for years that easy-to-use encryption (really, he meant all encryption) was just far too dangerous to have in the wild–unless tech companies put backdoors into that encryption for the Department of Homeland Slavery…I mean…Security (really, when it comes to government, those words are synonymous) to be able to readily access.

Fortunately, tech companies–from Alphabet to Microsoft–all told the government the same thing: You can’t have REAL encryption, and backdoors within that encryption, at the same time. “Can’t have your cake and eat it, too, babe“, as Vince Neil would sing.

So now White House spokesperson Mark Stroh has stated this:

We are actively engaged with private companies to ensure they understand the public safety and national security risks that result from malicious actors’ use of their encrypted products and services. However, the administration is not seeking legislation at this time.

And now everybody is just cheering and opening up the wine bottles claiming that “we’ve won” and that the US government has backed off of trying to break encryption.

But hold on, why does does this quote from the White House say, “However, the administration is not seeking legislation at this time” (emphasis mine)? It’d be easy for me to theorize that the US government is just going for the ol’ “bait and switch”. That in the future they’ll just reintroduce the legislation and not back off next time. And maybe that’s what’s going on. Or maybe–as some have suggested–the NSA and others have already cracked all of this encryption and there’s no longer any need for a law to force tech companies into building backdoors. That’s certainly possible, too.

I will say for certain that I don’t believe the US government–or any government for that matter–is no longer interested in breaking encryption. That’s unbelievable. This battle of domination systems (not just government) versus encryption has been going on forever, and in the tech sector it’s been going on since at least the development of PGP. Sorry, governments don’t ever really back off from anything, they just choose another vector of approach/attack.

But, in my opinion, maybe it’s not even about breaking encryption anymore. Maybe it’s as simple as performing keylogging on all of those touchscreen keyboards on mobile devices and others. Maybe SwiftKey, or Alphabet/Google, or Apple, or whoever, is just passing that data on–no need to break encryption anywhere.

But really, this is all speculation. The New York Times suggests that recent data breaches against the Federal government is making the government look like fools, and has weakened the American public’s confidence in their governments ability to secure and handle information–information received from a backdoor or not.

Yeah. Maybe. But then that just proves the idea that the government is biding its time.

Regardless, keep using that encryption. Encrypt every goddamned thing you can. If anything–as I always say–it makes things expensive for the government and its goons.

And whatever you do, don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking that government is “doing the right thing” here. Organizations based around violence can never do the right thing.